A brief survey on secure multi-party computing in the presence of rational parties

Intelligent agents (IA) are autonomous entities which observe through sensors and act upon an environment using actuators to adjust their activities towards achieving certain goals. The architectures of agents have enormous potentials when they are applied into critical systems, where agents choose actions between working with their own and cooperating with others. Rational utility-based agents choose actions to maximize their expected utilities. Rational secure multi-party computing (RSMPC) means secure multi-party computing (SMPC) in the presence of rational utility-based agents. Here, we call them rational parties. In this paper certain goals of rational parties are maximizing their utilities. The introduction of rational parties considers the incentives in executing protocols. The security definitions under rational framework can better demonstrate the executing environment of real protocols. Furthermore, rational two-party computing removes some impossibility in traditional two-party computing, such as fairness. This paper represents the research status of RSMPC and some typical protocols. The advantages and disadvantages of previous rational SMPC protocols are discussed here. As an emerging field, there are still lots of open problems in RSMPC, such as communication channels, utility assumptions and equilibrium notions etc.